How to Back Up Your Windows PC: 2 Built-In Tools to Keep Your Data Safe

I’m guilty of ignoring Windows prompts reminding me to create a backup of my PC. I use Dropbox to create backups of many of my files, but it doesn’t protect everything on my computer. Neither OneDrive. There are Windows settings, apps, and other odds and ends that I just don’t back up regularly. That’s why I’m using World Backup Day today as an excuse to back up my PC, and I urge you to do the same – before disaster strikes.

If my PC stopped working today, I would have to configure it from scratch. I would still have a lot of my files on Dropbox, but I would spend a lot of time installing apps and getting everything back to the way it was. But Windows offers two different ways to back up your PC: Backup and Restore And File History.

Backup and Restore allows you to create a full image backup, and File History allows you to backup and recover selected files and folders. Regardless of the method, you will need a external hard drive or SSD. The unofficial rule for how much storage a backup drive should have is 1.5 to 2 times the size of your computer’s storage. If your Windows 11 laptop has 512 GB of storage, for example, you’ll need a backup drive with 1 TB of space.

Below I’ll walk you through how to set up routine backups of your most important files, as well as how to create a complete copy of your system in its current state.

Backup and Restore

In Windows 11, connect your external drive to your PC. Open it Control panel and access System and Security > Backup and Restore (Windows 7) and click Configure backup. (You can ignore the Windows 7 bit. It’s just a holdover from an earlier version of Windows; the Control Panel remains strangely outdated.) From there, you can choose your external drive and then let Windows choose which files to back up, or you can choose which files and libraries you want to back up with a full system image.

A system image includes every application, setting, file, folder – everything. The advantage of using this method is that if your PC crashes and you need to configure everything again, you simply restore the system image and you are back in action. The downside is that the image you’re creating is from that very moment, so if it’s been a while since your last creation, you’ll lose any changed settings, newly installed apps, and files you don’t store in a cloud service or back up to another external drive.

Once you have everything selected, click Following and then Save settings and run backup.

From this location in Control Panel, you will be able to manually start a backup by simply clicking the button Back up now button. By default, Windows will backup every week, but you can change the schedule in Settings. Also from this location you can restore files from a previous backup.

File History

File History is another backup tool that you can access from Windows Control Panel. Go to System and Security > File History to activate it. It will copy files from local folders in your Windows Library as well as anything on your desktop, as well as your contacts and favorites. On the left you can click Exclude folders to tell File History to ignore certain things.

And if you click Advanced settings On the left you can choose how often File History should save your files and for how long. By default, File History will back up your data every hour, but you can also configure it every 10 minutes or once a day. File History will keep backups forever, but you can change it to keep your files for between a month and two years – or as space is needed.

Are you using a Mac? Learn how to make a Time Machine backup on MacOS.